They claim that IE doesn't follow the standards and web designers design for IE.
Well with my knowledge of web designing, I know that IE follows the standards perfectly well and goes out of its way to correctly and intelligently render improperly coded web pages that DONT follow the standards.
Firefox and Opera rigidly follows the rules with no slack and any slight screw up on the page will break the site.
They should be suing web designers for designing crappy pages that dont work in their browser, and Microsoft should be awarded for their intelligent error correcting browser.
Hmm let's see, buy an OS with a FREE Internet browser or buy one without a browser and spend MORE money on some jinky browser nobody uses? It's a rhetorical question.
Judges need to start putting the smack-down on frivolous lawsuits so companies stop filing them. If it's something legit go with it, otherwise revers the charges and teach them!
Look at it with IE, FF, and Opera. Notice which one passes, which one fails somewhat, and which one fails miserably. Then try and tell us IE adheres to web standards.
Kurlan, I'm sorry, but you're talking out of your bottom. By standards, they mean the World Wide Web Consortium's standards - and Internet Explorer definitely does not adhere to them anywhere near as closely as other browsers. IE7 is a step forward in some ways (and a step back in others, try left floating a UL for example), but it's still miles behind Firefox.
It's never IE being wonderful and making something pretty out of bad code, it's always people having to code badly to get IE to render properly. An important distinction. Between some odd interpretations of CSS and the differences between JavaScript and JScript, IE adds work to a developer's day.
I'm not an anti-Microsoft type nor an IE basher (other than coding pages that it *and* Gecko-based browser likes, I've never had a problem with it), but nor am I going to defend it so blindly.
Opera is now completely free and no longer ad supported. (Also going by the test I just posted it adheres to web standards better than FF, and usually renders pages more quickly too...but since it is a browser not many use, no one caters to it like they do IE and FF.) I suppose if you want to be overly critical, you could give it crap for not being open source.
I think your wrong in your statement, unless your talking about IE7. I mainly use Firefox to check the web pages I make, but I also use IE6 to check pages before I upload. Usually I end up having to change something in the code to make sure it also works with IE. Sometimes because I forgot a close td, my problem not IE's, but firefox displayed the page propperly and IE had no clue what to do with it. Everything I've heard is that even with a propperly coded page as far as the w3c standards go, a page has to be changed to go against the w3c standards to work with IE6 and below.
I can't believe I'm reading that someone who claims to have web development experience is calling Internet Explorer, even 7, anything that resembles W3C standards compliant.
Whether or not you consider it to be Microsoft admitting that Internet Explorer is a piece of poo, there are a series of custom conditional statements you can place in the header of HTML to tell Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer to load certain stylesheets, which normal browsers ignore as a comment. Basically, the significance of this is that you can make an entire separate set of stylesheets just for Internet Explorer to get your pages to load properly. That's an admission of guilt if you ask me.
Uhh if you really are a web dev, then I cant believe the words that you just typed. IE is the most broken POS that has ever graced the internet. I mean the simple fact that it doesnt support pseudo classes; namely :hover (among others, :first etc..) is a flippin joke. And another testament to its complete and utter junk is that fact that it's CSS parser will still read a statement if its got a "_" before it. Now I suppose you could say that this was clever foresight on M$'s part, because they knew how crumb the browser is and included it to help us poor web devs...but no I think it just proves how lazy/crappy the team who dev'ed it was...
Anywho, point is, I create w3c validated (XHTML 1.0 and CSS) web pages, and yet i still have to fuddle around with my code to get IE working properly.
They're sueing them through the EU because the EU has already demonstrated their willingness to depart from previous understandings that home countries usually implement remedies against anti-competitive behavior, when they levied the record breaking 1/2 billion dollar fine against Microsoft.
Not sure how they can even quantitfy tangible damages for a product thats a free download. I suspect however, like in cases where the EU unfairly promotes member corporations like Airbus against Boeing, General Electric, etc. that it won't matter -- the EU will rule in its typical fashion.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but there was once a company called Netscape that sold what was, for the time, the best major browser on the market for about $20. Then Microsoft started to "give away" (i.e., include in the price of Windows) Internet Explorer. Netscape had to stop charging for its browser.
Because it couldn't bundle the price of development in with a product that almost everybody needed to buy, like MS could, Netscape lost its browser revenue stream and basically stopped developing significant improvements. IE became a better browser than Netscape's for a while.
Once it had near total dominance in the browser market, MS stopped making any significant improvements either. (How long was before the release of IE 7.0, was the last significant upgrade?) Opera was around and better than IE (had tabbed browsing, etc.) but its market share was tiny because it needed a way to get money from users - you could buy it or get the free ad-supported version, which most people found annoying. Most users didn't want to pay the price in dollars or in ads, so Opera was never a major player. It wasn't until Firefox came on the scene as a free and much better competitor to IE that MS started developing real improvements in its browser again.
I may have oversimplified a bit, but this could be a case study in the harms a monopoly can bring. MS used its monopoly power in the OS market to leverage itself to a dominant position in browsers and, while it made a good browser for a while, once it had dominance in the browser market, it absolutely ceased investment in making its products better. It was only once the open source Firefox managed to compete without significant revenues that MS started improving its products again. Moral: Competition good, monopoly bad.
BTW, is it too cynical to think that MS, once it had a dominant share of the browser market, had an incentive not to comply with standards so that sites that worked on IE wouldn't work on its competitors? Only if you think a monopolist doesn't understand the value of barriers to entry of new competitors.
Netscape the best browser? In your dreams. It sucked. It constantly crashed for no reason, leaked memory and was slow. What did them in was that they then started charging for it. That went badly so they declared only corporate customers had to pay. (Yes, Netscape was originally free for everyone. They started charging for it AFTER IE came out. Netscape has been lying about this for years to play the victim.)
well i guess the point they are trying to get across is that people should be able to remove IE at any point if they dont feel comfortable with it, an at this point people still can't do it, you could disable part of the browser but you can't completly remove it from a windows machine, and guess what hackers are loving everything about it. The same way Mac users can remove IE from there macs or even safari there native browser windows users should have the same control over there machines, otherwise the next time IE launches by itself with spam while your using Mozilla or any other browser someones getting sue
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If you can't sue them here, sue them there.
M
Actually, they could probably sue them in the US - but being a European company it's easier doing it at home...
They claim that IE doesn't follow the standards and web designers design for IE.
Well with my knowledge of web designing, I know that IE follows the standards perfectly well and goes out of its way to correctly and intelligently render improperly coded web pages that DONT follow the standards.
Firefox and Opera rigidly follows the rules with no slack and any slight screw up on the page will break the site.
They should be suing web designers for designing crappy pages that dont work in their browser, and Microsoft should be awarded for their intelligent error correcting browser.
Hmm let's see, buy an OS with a FREE Internet browser or buy one without a browser and spend MORE money on some jinky browser nobody uses? It's a rhetorical question.
Judges need to start putting the smack-down on frivolous lawsuits so companies stop filing them. If it's something legit go with it, otherwise revers the charges and teach them!
@Kurian
Go here:
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
Look at it with IE, FF, and Opera. Notice which one passes, which one fails somewhat, and which one fails miserably. Then try and tell us IE adheres to web standards.
Kurlan, I'm sorry, but you're talking out of your bottom. By standards, they mean the World Wide Web Consortium's standards - and Internet Explorer definitely does not adhere to them anywhere near as closely as other browsers. IE7 is a step forward in some ways (and a step back in others, try left floating a UL for example), but it's still miles behind Firefox.
It's never IE being wonderful and making something pretty out of bad code, it's always people having to code badly to get IE to render properly. An important distinction. Between some odd interpretations of CSS and the differences between JavaScript and JScript, IE adds work to a developer's day.
I'm not an anti-Microsoft type nor an IE basher (other than coding pages that it *and* Gecko-based browser likes, I've never had a problem with it), but nor am I going to defend it so blindly.
@Azayzel
Opera is now completely free and no longer ad supported. (Also going by the test I just posted it adheres to web standards better than FF, and usually renders pages more quickly too...but since it is a browser not many use, no one caters to it like they do IE and FF.) I suppose if you want to be overly critical, you could give it crap for not being open source.
@Kurian
I think your wrong in your statement, unless your talking about IE7. I mainly use Firefox to check the web pages I make, but I also use IE6 to check pages before I upload. Usually I end up having to change something in the code to make sure it also works with IE. Sometimes because I forgot a close td, my problem not IE's, but firefox displayed the page propperly and IE had no clue what to do with it. Everything I've heard is that even with a propperly coded page as far as the w3c standards go, a page has to be changed to go against the w3c standards to work with IE6 and below.
Up next: Sparco sues Ford, GM, and new owners of Chrysler for bundling seats; butts everywhere rejoice.
I can't believe I'm reading that someone who claims to have web development experience is calling Internet Explorer, even 7, anything that resembles W3C standards compliant.
Whether or not you consider it to be Microsoft admitting that Internet Explorer is a piece of poo, there are a series of custom conditional statements you can place in the header of HTML to tell Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer to load certain stylesheets, which normal browsers ignore as a comment. Basically, the significance of this is that you can make an entire separate set of stylesheets just for Internet Explorer to get your pages to load properly. That's an admission of guilt if you ask me.
@Kurian
Uhh if you really are a web dev, then I cant believe the words that you just typed. IE is the most broken POS that has ever graced the internet. I mean the simple fact that it doesnt support pseudo classes; namely :hover (among others, :first etc..) is a flippin joke. And another testament to its complete and utter junk is that fact that it's CSS parser will still read a statement if its got a "_" before it. Now I suppose you could say that this was clever foresight on M$'s part, because they knew how crumb the browser is and included it to help us poor web devs...but no I think it just proves how lazy/crappy the team who dev'ed it was...
Anywho, point is, I create w3c validated (XHTML 1.0 and CSS) web pages, and yet i still have to fuddle around with my code to get IE working properly.
They're sueing them through the EU because the EU has already demonstrated their willingness to depart from previous understandings that home countries usually implement remedies against anti-competitive behavior, when they levied the record breaking 1/2 billion dollar fine against Microsoft.
Not sure how they can even quantitfy tangible damages for a product thats a free download. I suspect however, like in cases where the EU unfairly promotes member corporations like Airbus against Boeing, General Electric, etc. that it won't matter -- the EU will rule in its typical fashion.
@ Azayzel,
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but there was once a company called Netscape that sold what was, for the time, the best major browser on the market for about $20. Then Microsoft started to "give away" (i.e., include in the price of Windows) Internet Explorer. Netscape had to stop charging for its browser.
Because it couldn't bundle the price of development in with a product that almost everybody needed to buy, like MS could, Netscape lost its browser revenue stream and basically stopped developing significant improvements. IE became a better browser than Netscape's for a while.
Once it had near total dominance in the browser market, MS stopped making any significant improvements either. (How long was before the release of IE 7.0, was the last significant upgrade?) Opera was around and better than IE (had tabbed browsing, etc.) but its market share was tiny because it needed a way to get money from users - you could buy it or get the free ad-supported version, which most people found annoying. Most users didn't want to pay the price in dollars or in ads, so Opera was never a major player. It wasn't until Firefox came on the scene as a free and much better competitor to IE that MS started developing real improvements in its browser again.
I may have oversimplified a bit, but this could be a case study in the harms a monopoly can bring. MS used its monopoly power in the OS market to leverage itself to a dominant position in browsers and, while it made a good browser for a while, once it had dominance in the browser market, it absolutely ceased investment in making its products better. It was only once the open source Firefox managed to compete without significant revenues that MS started improving its products again. Moral: Competition good, monopoly bad.
BTW, is it too cynical to think that MS, once it had a dominant share of the browser market, had an incentive not to comply with standards so that sites that worked on IE wouldn't work on its competitors? Only if you think a monopolist doesn't understand the value of barriers to entry of new competitors.
(Response to above.)
Netscape the best browser? In your dreams. It sucked. It constantly crashed for no reason, leaked memory and was slow. What did them in was that they then started charging for it. That went badly so they declared only corporate customers had to pay. (Yes, Netscape was originally free for everyone. They started charging for it AFTER IE came out. Netscape has been lying about this for years to play the victim.)
@Joe
... And if it weren't for Netscape, we'd never have the Mozilla Foundation, and subsequently never have the REAL competitor to IE, AKA "Firefox".
(That means shut your yap; Netscape has more than made up for their past.)
well i guess the point they are trying to get across is that people should be able to remove IE at any point if they dont feel comfortable with it, an at this point people still can't do it, you could disable part of the browser but you can't completly remove it from a windows machine, and guess what hackers are loving everything about it. The same way Mac users can remove IE from there macs or even safari there native browser windows users should have the same control over there machines, otherwise the next time IE launches by itself with spam while your using Mozilla or any other browser someones getting sue